


What Might Have Been

by Telaryn



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Boundaries, Captain America: The First Avenger, Fear of Death, Fear of Discovery, First Time, Kissing, Multi, Non-Explicit, Regret, Teasing, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M, Touching, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 01:12:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3917644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One night in France, Peggy Carter goes looking for Steve and Bucky and ends up finding out more about herself and her feelings than she ever wanted to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Might Have Been

**Author's Note:**

> The image of Peggy in Bucky's lap with Steve kissing her as mortar shells explode around them has been in my head since Howard Stark uttered those immortal words "I know - I loved him too." It's taken me this long to find the words to even come close to the picture in my brain.
> 
> Perfect show is perfect.

Years later the memory would always come back to her with the awareness of how completely and tragically drunk they’d been. Steve and Barnes had snuck out of camp after supper, heading for a tavern in town that Colonel Phillips had specifically declared off limits. Peggy was already beginning to wonder about the wisdom of letting Captain America spend the endless stretch of days while they waited for Hitler’s forces to show themselves again with his childhood best friend and nothing to distract them.

“Carter, how do you manage to look that sinfully good in khakis?” Barnes raised a full glass of whisky in salute as she came through the door, his dark eyes roaming appreciatively and unapologetically over her body. She’d glanced automatically at Captain Rogers, looking for his opinion of his best friend’s behavior – predictably, Steve’s fair skin was flushed a deep crimson, and he was staring resolutely at a gouge in the table’s surface.

Never one to back down off a challenge, Peggy turned her attention back to Barnes. “You keep this up Sergeant, and I suspect you are going to become intimately acquainted with the idea of ‘confined to quarters’.” She reached the table and ran her fingers over the neck of the bottle sitting between the two men. “One of you big, strong hero types get a girl a glass?”

There was a clatter of wood as both men started to their feet, but Barnes had settled it quickly with a hand on Steve’s arm. “I’m not the one she wants to talk to, genius.”

He went behind the bar, leaving Steve halfway to his feet staring up at her like some terrified woodland creature. “Sit Captain Rogers, please,” she said gently, covering his hand with her own. It took him a beat to react, but when she took the only free chair at the table for herself he managed to find his own seat again.

“Did the Colonel send you to find us?”

Peggy smiled. “Dugan, actually. He wanted to make sure that you found him some bourbon.” Colonel Phillips had tried restricting the boys’ movements shortly after they’d lost track of the forces they’d been chasing. His argument had been that Captain Steven Rogers was government property the same as any tank or gun in camp.

Every member of the 107th had disappeared from camp that night. They’d found them late the next day, everyone except Steve passed out cold amidst the wreckage of alcohol stores they’d acquired from somewhere none of them would admit to.

Now it was Steve’s turn to grin, ducking his head. “Bourbon in France in the middle of a war. The man’s insane.”

Barnes rejoined them at the table, a second bottle in one hand and a glass in the other that he set down in front of Peggy. “He needs to start sucking up to Jones. Gabe’s like nothing I’ve ever seen for finding supplies.” He swept up the first bottle and poured a full glass of amber liquid for Peggy. “If there’s a bottle of bourbon to be had in the whole of Europe, he’s the man to find it.”

Taking his seat again, he raised his abandoned glass. Peggy took hers up as well – Steve following suit – and the three of them clinked their glasses. Peggy could still remember the burn as she tossed off the entire glass in one shot. There was a brief moment of awkwardness as both Steve and Bucky reached for the bottle to refill her, but Barnes immediately pulled his hand back; grinning and gesturing for Steve to go ahead.

The second round went at a more reasonable pace. With Barnes and his easy charm to act as a buffer, Steve gradually managed to overcome his natural shyness around women. He was smart, funny, self-deprecating, and by the time they cracked open the second bottle Peggy had completely lost her heart to the man Steve Rogers.

She wasn’t the only one either, she realized after Barnes had told a particularly bawdy joke that startled Steve into laughing so hard he choked. Bucky had gotten immediately to his feet and moved into position to slap Steve solidly on the back until the Captain could breathe again. Rogers hadn’t been able to see his friend’s expression, but Peggy could. The complicated tangle of emotion in his eyes had been a revelation – one Barnes would later insist she had imagined because of the whisky.

Peggy was never able to recall with any accuracy when the first shell had hit, and she _had_ tried. The only thing she did know was that her glass was touching her lips when her brain registered the scream of an incoming mortar. Steve had her by the arm in the next breath, dragging to her feet and towards the shelter of the bar; Bucky hard on their heels. She ended up on the floor in Barnes’ lap, Steve shielding them both with his body as glass and wood splintered and shattered around them.

“Damn inconvenient,” she muttered, looking up and meeting Steve’s eyes. Her heart skipped a beat as she realized how close they suddenly were. “It was…good, um…” It was also the first time she’d really noticed how blue his eyes were.

“Yeah…” Steve whispered, and then he was kissing her. It was more passion than skill, but Peggy had immediately arched up into it, reaching up to hook her hand at the back of his neck. Only Bucky’s arm around her waist kept her in place.

Another explosion, this one closer than the others, showered them with dirt and splinters. When Peggy’s ears stopped ringing, she realized that Bucky had pushed her hair aside, and was trailing soft, teasing kisses down the side of her neck. “Is this okay?” Steve asked gently, drawing her attention again.

 _So drunk…_ Nights when she was able to be honest with herself however, Peggy was able to admit that the alcohol had been an excuse – pushing the three of them towards a moment they’d been dancing around for weeks.

“We’re not going anywhere until those Germans get bored,” she managed at last, shivering as Bucky trailed calloused fingertips down the bare skin of her arms.

It took Steve a second to read her expression, but then he smiled. Rolling smoothly to his knees in front of her, he braced himself with one hand on the bar before leaning in and kissing her again. Bucky’s hands on her grew bolder, his breath hot on her skin as he traced behind her ear with the point of his tongue.

Heat pooled low in her body as somebody’s hands tugged slowly at her blouse, pulling it free of her khakis. Peggy was suddenly aware that when Steve had shifted position his right knee had pressed in close between her thighs, pushing the seam of her pants against flesh gone unbearably tender and sensitive. A finger hooked into her waistband, pulling gently in silent question.

“Above the waist boys,” Peggy breathed softly, breaking off the kiss and leaning back to include Bucky in the statement. Barnes’ dark eyes were full of all the ways he wanted this moment to end up, but all he said with a smile was, “I think we can live with that.” It was his turn to kiss her then, his technique more practiced than Steve’s, drawing a soft moan from her throat.

A fresh explosion rocked the world around them; Steve pressed in tight, draping his large from more thoroughly around them. “Should we run?” he asked, looking at her as the dust settled around them with a hiss. “They’re getting closer.”

“We have no idea where troops might be positioned, or what’s going on out there,” Bucky argued, before she could say anything. “We’ll get cut to ribbons.”

“I won’t,” Steve insisted, his expression earnest. “At least I think I won’t. I can go get help.”

Peggy shook her head, visions of Steve hurt or dying exploding in her mind. They knew so little about the limits of Erskine’s formula, even now. “You’re not going anywhere, Captain,” she said, flinching as another shell exploded much too close. “That’s an order, do you hear me?” Before he could argue, she dragged him in for another kiss.

She never knew if Bucky heard Steve whimper low in his throat as they kissed; Barnes had returned his attention to the back of her neck, his hands under her blouse, tracing lines of fire across her back and belly. It felt amazing all on its own, but combined with the awareness of somebody as large and powerful and perfect as Steve coming apart under her touch had nearly driven her to throw all caution to the proverbial wind.

Peggy had managed to hold firm in the moment, but it was a near thing. As they kissed and touched and held each other with the world exploding around them, she gradually came to terms with the fact that she wanted both men – in different ways and for different reasons – but as strongly and definitively as she had ever wanted anything in her life.

Nothing had ever come of it, of course. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes would be listed as “missing, presumed dead” only days later, and of course it would be a short handful of weeks before she was saying a tearful good-bye to Captain Steve Rogers as he put a Hydra plane into the icy waters of the Arctic circle.

The shelling had finally stopped a few hours before dawn. “Should we make a run for it?” Steve asked, once they realized the silence could be trusted.

“We still don’t know what it looks like out there,” Peggy said immediately, reluctant to leave the safety of their nest for more reasons than the obvious. “I think we should stay put until it’s light out at least.”

“She’s right,” Bucky said automatically. “Phillips is going to have people out looking for us as soon as it’s safe anyway.” He’d shifted out from behind her at last, putting her off his lap, so she could see how pointedly he looked at Steve when he said it.

Steve clearly understood what Bucky had dodged so neatly around saying out loud. “We should get some sleep then,” he said, still glancing around nervously.

They’d talked a bit longer, the three of them being far too wound up after everything to even think about settling. Eventually though, Peggy’s eyelids had begun to flutter. Both Steve and Bucky urged her down on her side, her head pillowed on one of Steve’s thighs and Bucky’s hand resting on her waist. Steve wouldn’t move for the rest of the night, but when Howard Stark – of all people – located them at mid-morning, he was as deeply asleep as either Bucky or Peggy, his head tipped back against the wood of the bar. Bucky’s head was pillowed in his lap, the sergeant’s arm wrapped protectively around Peggy’s waist.

Everyone had been relieved to find them safe and relatively whole, although Steve and Bucky ended up on the wrong end of a thorough chewing out from Colonel Phillips for leaving the camp without permission and putting her in harm’s way. Through it all she was braced for lewd and inappropriate comments from Howard, or at least questions from the rest of the boys once the story of how the three of them had been found finished circulating.

Nothing was ever said. Occasionally in the days and weeks that followed she would imagine a look in Stark’s eyes, but the expected observations never followed. She’d had it in the back of her mind to see if he had ever said anything to Steve or Bucky, but before she could find the space or the courage to raise the question they were out of time…

…for everything.


End file.
